


What Wings May Come

by punsandships



Category: In Other Lands | The Turn of the Story - Sarah Rees Brennan
Genre: Camping, Elliot actually waking up warm, Elliot likes wings, Elliot with one single iota of emotional intelligence, Fighting trolls, Harpies, Luke likes Elliot, Luke's identity crisis, M/M, Morning Wing, Oh No They Have to Share a Tent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 10:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21073067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punsandships/pseuds/punsandships
Summary: Things which were Rachel Sunborn’s fault:Luke was some bizarre half-human half-harpy hybrid creature.Luke was allergic to coconut.Things which were Elliot Schafer’s fault:Basically everything else.





	What Wings May Come

Things which were Rachel Sunborn’s fault:  
Luke was some bizarre half-human half-harpy hybrid creature.  
Luke was allergic to coconut.

Things which were Elliot Schafer’s fault:  
Basically everything else.

Particularly the fact that Luke was lying in a tent inches away from Elliot, who should be back at the border camp right now. And the fact that Luke sprouted fully formed wings at some point in the middle of the night. One of which was resting across Elliot Shafer’s sleeping form.

The fact that his wings decided to burst out of his shoulder blades and take up more than their fair share of the space in the tent did not mean that Luke knew how to control them. In fact, the panic that he was experiencing due to their sudden appearance made it very hard to get them to do anything.

“Elliot. Wake up. Wake up right now. We have a situation.”

Elliot made a soft, happy sound. Elliot did not make soft sounds often, nor happy sounds, and certainly not both at once. It was almost enough to convince Luke to let him keep sleeping. But the rest of the camp was going to be waking up soon, and they’d need Luke to do everything for them, as usual.

That wasn’t a nice thought. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that the harpies were extra interested in him. Except for Rachel Sunborn, of course. And it wasn’t as if he had to do everything. Serene and Elliot could probably negotiate with the harpies without Luke there. Everyone had just found it more convenient to do it with him as the bait. And he had agreed, because it seemed important. It had seemed like a way to get everyone to stop glaring at him, and bumping against him in the cafeteria, and throwing the Trigon ball at him when he was distracted by looking up in the stands. If this was the price for reminding everyone that he was securely on the side of the humans and heroes, he’d do it. Even if it did make the horrible process of figuring out who and what he actually was into an interactive field trip for most of the combat course students.

“We have a serious problem, Elliot,” Luke snapped. “Can you wake up?”

Elliot shifted under Luke’s outstretched wing. “S’warm.”

And then Luke felt Elliot’s fingers, gentle and slow, tracing through his feathers. It was affectionate, like when his mother ran her fingers through Luke’s hair. Before Luke knew what was happening, his shoulders shifted and his neck stretched.

He was preening. Nope. Nope nope.

“Elliot,” Luke ground out. “Do not touch them.”

Elliot was up then, like a wildfire in the tent. “Wow,” he breathed, clenching his hands at his sides. “Those are--those are some wings. Wow. I don’t know how well you can see them from your angle, but with the light shining through them, they’re gold. Not like, blond gold. Real gold with some orange to it. It’s like Jase’s beard. It looked brown most of the time, but in the right light you could see that it actually had auburn in it, too. It just, like, elevated the whole thing. There’s so many colors in your feathers.”

Leave it to Elliot Schaffer to be entranced by the wings instead of totally horrified by going to sleep in a tent next to someone that seemed human and waking up next to a freak. Of course, Luke shouldn’t be too surprised. Last night Elliot had almost seemed like he was interested in the harpy girl who’d brought him a dead rabbit. Which had to be a joke: Elliot didn’t even like dead animals, there was no way he’d last in a relationship with creatures that drank from skulls. It had to be Elliot’s sarcasm.

Luke wasn’t the best at identifying when Elliot was being sarcastic. When Luke told Elliot how he’d rescued him from any possible awkward situations by telling Celaeno that Elliot was his boyfriend, Elliot had responded, “I can’t believe you. You’re terrible. I could have had a girlfriend with wings. Wings, Luke.” He sounded seriously irritated. But he always sounded irritated.

And Luke’s subconscious seemed totally out of the loop on the sarcasm thing, since he had taken the next opportunity to sprout wings. Honestly? What could be less subtle than that? He might as well have said, “Hey, Elliot, I hear that you are interested in wings. I can do that. Is there any other way I can rearrange my body to make myself more attractive to you?”

When Elliot figured that out, there’d be no getting him to shut up. Luke had been certain for years that Elliot would find it hilarious that Luke harbored feelings for him. The fact that Elliot had suddenly pulled boyfriend-Jason from his past was confusing. It didn’t fit with Elliot’s reaction when Luke’s cousin had tried to woo him during the Sunborn tournament. But it didn’t change anything; Luke figured his own cousin was a better test for how Elliot would react than some other-world beardy-boy.

While Elliot went on about different colors in hair and feathers, Luke managed to fold his wings away and grab a shirt. That was as far as he got. Actually putting on the shirt was a challenge of its own, and he could feel Elliot’s eyes on him. On his shuddering shoulder blades.

“Let me help you.”

Oh no. That was not happening. Luke needed to be well out of this tent and far away from Elliot before his jokes turned from “morning wing,” whatever that was, and onto the topic of how Luke had apparently just grown wings to get his attention. “No.”

“Someone has to,” Elliot said, and he seemed to be right. “I could go get Serene, or Da-”

“No!” His voice came out like a caw, like the warnings that the harpies called from the trees. If Elliot didn’t stop trying to drag Dale into everything, Luke was going to crack.

It was a terrible thing to have the person he wanted most already there and still feel like he had no one to help. There was no one Luke wanted more to trust to help him through this moment, and Elliot was right here. But he also knew that Ellop didn’t particularly care to help unless his reward was stashing some of his contraband in Luke’s cabin or otherwise getting his way.

“Okay,” Elliot said. He did not sound amused anymore, or awed. His voice had gone quieter. “Give me a knife.”

“Oh no,” Luke almost laughed. Could this situation be made any worse by giving Elliot a weapon? What was he going to do, throw it from the tent to alert someone to their predicament? “What are you going to do with a knife?” Luke retrieved the knife his father had given him when he was six and handed it to Elliot. Elliot Danger-to-Himself-and-Others Schafer could be unpredictable around weapons, but he certainly wouldn’t hurt Luke that way. Elliot maneuvered behind him in the close space and started plucking at the stitching on his shirt.

Luke couldn’t still his wings. They were twitching and fluttering, brushing at the material of the tent and shifting the fabric of the shirt under Elliot’s fingers. Were they always going to be so demonstrative? Luke had managed to keep them from sprouting for so long. Why hadn’t he been able to wait a few more days, until he was out of this cursed sharing-a-tent situation? Until he was back at camp where the harpies wouldn’t have another excuse to take him farther and farther into their own world? Luke focused on breathing.

And then Elliot pressed his palm against the back of Luke’s neck and whispered, “Shhh.”

Luke shivered. He hoped the motion had been camouflaged by the trembling of his wings.

Elliot’s hand rested on the back of his neck, calming and gentle. So, he had been blessed with a visitation from Nice Elliot. Luke found it very difficult to predict what earned such a miracle. Apparently getting brained by a Trigon ball did, but not winning the Sunborn tournament, breaking records in Trigon, or even joining the school play. It seemed like he could add sprouting wings to the list of things that worked. Now that Elliot’s initial shock had worn off, maybe he understood how bad this actually was, and he felt more sympathetic toward Luke.

“You shouldn’t--you shouldn’t have to touch.”

Nice Elliot responded in a soft voice. “I don’t mind.”

He let the shirt drop into place and Luke turned around and ruined everything, as usual. “What are you wearing?”

Elliot frowned. Luke could see what he was wearing, of course. A tight, thin shirt with some kind of arms across the chest. Blue Jeans that he had to have bought the last time he visited the world on the other side of the wall, even if they did fit strangely, resting low on his hips. Why did Elliot bother to keep buying those clothes when he knew they were contraband here? Not only contraband, but distracting.

Elliot was only too happy to get defensive about his clothing choices. Just like that, Nice Elliot was gone, and Luke was left with an Elliot who was too busy for Luke, with a full day ahead of him of flirting with Podarge and aggressively pushing his treaty.

As Luke watched Elliot walk away with his feather-fire hair, he couldn’t stop his brain from protesting, _but I grew wings, too_.

He hadn’t been immediately able to control the wings, but it didn’t take long to figure out how to fly with them, how to stop and hover in one place, how to dive. The other harpies were beyond delighted, and Luke couldn’t stop smiling. It had been terrible to hold the wings back all these weeks--months--however long it had been. And now everyone who saw him would know what he was, but so what? He could fly.

He didn’t even notice when Celaeno’s first in command flew in front of the sun and sent a shadow over all of them. Celaeno called out. “Luke? Trolls are on the move. Look to your friends.”

He spotted Serene first, laughing and spinning in the midst of a cavalcade of trolls. He caught her up under her arms and dropped her at the flank where she could do more good.

“Luke,” she said urgently. “Elliot is back there, amidst all of the enemies.”

He should have expected. He’d thought Elliot might be off in the trees somewhere, safely taking notes on an aerial garden. How could he forget that where trouble was, there was Elliot Schafer?

Luke shot into the fray and dropped to Elliot’s side. He always knew exactly what moves to make in battle, but suddenly his arms and legs felt odd and jittery. Should he grab Elliot like he did Serene, or-- Elliot took all the guesswork out of it, throwing his arms around Luke’s neck. Luke scooped him up and his wings unfurled like sails, slapping aside one of the trolls who was creeping closer. As they shot into the sky, his heart kicked against his chest at high speed. With any luck, Elliot would think it was just the adrenaline of battle. Actually, Luke’s mind raced ahead to calculate just how many air-rescues he could stage before Elliot caught on and stopped holding him like this.

With Elliot safely--as long as he actually stayed where he was put for once--out of the way, Luke flew back to find his Sword Sister. It was entirely different fighting from the air, but it felt familiar, the way it had felt the first time he sunk an arrow into the center of a target. It didn’t even feel right exactly, because that implied that there was another way that was wrong. It felt like the only way.

He took a position above Serene, and suddenly they could cover not only all degrees, but multiple levels of attack. He’d fought at Serene’s side so many times with both feet planted on the ground, but he couldn’t imagine fighting another battle without the option to take off, to change the perspective of the fight. A laugh built in Luke’s chest until he let it ring out, loud and wicked. If enemy soldiers had thought they were a formidable team before, Serene and he would be the stuff of nightmares now. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to be a monster, after all.

There was a scream to his left and Luke dove, driving his sword between the armor of a troll guard before she could bring her mallet down on one of the girls in their class. What was her name? Della? Dora? Whatever it was, she would live to fight again. She nodded at Luke. Her eyes weren’t exactly friendly, but they didn’t hold the distrust they usually did when she looked his way.

At the end of the battle, Luke was so flushed with victory and the singing of his blood through his veins that he followed Celaeno’s cries into the treetops instead of following Serene.

It was a mistake.

He landed in the crook of a tree and took in the scene in front of him. Just as quickly, he turned around and gagged. He’d grown up with blood. He’d never gotten sick at the sight of a battlefield, but now it was all he could do to keep the contents of his stomach in place.

All around him, the same harpies who’d been teasing him about Elliot and sharing food around their campfire yesterday were rending the bodies of the trolls open and painting their faces with heartsblood.

It wasn’t the blood outside that made him sick. It was remembering the blood that ran in his veins. These monstrous impulses. He forced himself to watch as the harpies danced and desecrated, remembering that in the heat of the battle, he’d been glad to be a monster.

He staggered back to camp. Yes, he could fly, but if he joined them in the joy of slicing the air, how soon would he start cutting into corpses after battle? He just wanted to see Serene and Elliot, to have them welcome him, and for everything to feel normal again.

And then he had seen Elliot Schafer. Safe, just as Luke had left him. Leaning against Serene and tipping his head back to enjoy the last rays of sunlight. “Conquering hero!” Elliot greeted with one of his laughs that had to be sarcastic. “We’ve just polished off the last of that peace treaty! Good work all around.”

And Luke had been filled with rage.

Because all of this was pretend for Elliot. It was a game he could play. He could study elves and be fascinated with mermaids and flirt with harpies, and at the end he would always have reality: his Blue Jeans and rock t-shirts and a home somewhere else. It didn’t matter to him if Luke was a human or a harpy or a two-ton troll. Because no matter what else he was, he had never been anything more than a joke to Elliot.

This was not a joke. Luke wasn’t laughing about any of this. It wasn’t funny that he didn’t know what his body was going to do, or what horrific impulse would hit him next. It wasn’t funny that he wanted Elliot to stop laughing for long enough to tell Luke that he wasn’t a monster.

So Luke proceeded to be a monster. He called Elliot a snotty little brat, and said that Elliot could never understand the weight of all the expectations he carried, and then, when Elliot fought back, Luke had followed with the worst of it. “Nobody wants you in the human world, do they? That’s why you’re obsessed with elves and mermaids and monsters. There’s not a human anywhere who wants you. And I don’t blame them.”

Elliot had gone very pale. Luke braced himself for whatever Elliot would say next. Whatever he said would cut to the heart of how disgusting and wrong Luke was, and he couldn’t wait to bleed.

But Elliot brushed past Luke without a word and walked with stiff steps across the campground toward the bonfire.

Luke watched him approach Dale and strike up a conversation. He did not know what he’d been expecting Elliot to do. Throw himself into the fire? Kiss Dale? This had not been one of the foreseen outcomes.

“Luke?” Serene ventured.

He kept his eyes fixed on Elliot and Dale. He did not want to see the disapproval on Serene’s face. He deserved it, but he couldn’t face it now.

“Luke,” she continued sternly. “I know that Elliot says vexing things at times, but I think you hurt him very badly.”

“I don’t care.” Luke felt sick.

“I know you’ve had a trying day. I can only imagine how difficult the past few weeks have been for you. But Elliot came here for you.”

“That’s certainly what he told Commander Woodsinger,” Luke snorted. He had hated Elliot’s little smirk as he joked about how Luke needed him in this difficult time. Elliot knew how much Luke wanted him at his side, and it was just another joke.

“Maybe now is not the time. But I think you should apologize to Elliot.”

Oh, obviously. Of course he needed to apologize to Elliot. He’d never said anything so hideous to anyone before, made even more horrible by the fact that Elliot thought it was true. Arrows didn’t slay enemies unless they struck where they’d been aimed. Elliot would not have looked that way if he didn’t think that Luke was right.

He couldn’t sit here in the weight of Serene’s displeasure any longer. He turned and stalked toward the fire, where Elliot was screeching at Dale.

“I’ve told you before. Luke is shy. All you need to do is walk up to him, and say, ‘Hey Luke, I think you’re great. Show me your cool new wings. Let’s make out.’ Or any combination of those phrases.”

“I don’t know--” Dale trailed off, and Luke’s steps slowed. From here, their human eyes couldn’t see him. They were blinded by the brightness of the fire they sat by, and he was just far enough away to avoid detection. His heart thudded. He shouldn’t be listening to what Dale said. He didn’t want to know. “Listen, Luke is amazing.”

Elliot made a scoffing sound.

“But I don’t think he and I are a good match. Like, you’ve seen the things that these harpies do. They drink out of skulls. I don’t think I want my mouth--no. Luke’s cool, I just don’t see myself with him.”

The thudding in Luke’s heart stuttered. He’d known, of course. Dale had kept his distance since everyone at Border Camp found out that Luke was half-harpy. Luke had seen the looks Dale gave his harpy relatives. He’d felt the weight of Dale’s disgust. But he’d wanted to ignore it. He knew that Dale wouldn’t make any moves now, but he didn’t have any intention to actively woo Dale, either. Dale had always been his safety net, the person he could pretend would like him at the end of it all. His consolation when Dale couldn’t stop watching him during Trigon matches and Elliot kept asking who won at the end. Dale was the kind of boy Luke could see himself with: tall, and great at Trigon, and actually interested in Luke.

Luke waited for the disappointment or rejection to hit, but it didn’t. It didn’t hurt in a personal way that Dale was freaked out by the harpy thing. It was just that the safety net was gone.

Elliot growled. “Thanks for that explanation, Dale, but I’m going to have to request that you get over that and go out with him anyway. Because Luke is not happy. He is, in fact, very unhappy. It turns out that it doesn’t work well when both of us are unhappy, and I can’t fix it. He doesn’t want to hear from me that it doesn’t matter what he is, it matters who he is, etc, etc. He wants to hear that from you. So buckle on your ability to be a decent person and get over there.”

Luke took a step closer. He needed to put an end to this. He could apologize to Elliot for what he said and set Dale at ease by letting him know that he didn’t have to pretend.

Dale shrugged. “I’m sorry, Elliot, the wings are just a bit--”

“Hot?” Elliot interrupted. “Beautiful? Perfect, just like the rest of Luke Sunborn?”

Luke froze again. He was closer now, inside the circle of light but out of Elliot’s line of sight. He was so stupid. He must have misunderstood. Elliot was just being sarcastic, and he’d misread the tone of his voice again.

Dale ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “If that’s the case, why don’t you go over there and cheer Luke up.”

Elliot laughed the darkest of his laughs. “If only. But that’s not how it works, Dale. He likes you. He hates me. He’s never made that clearer than tonight.”

Luke stood, still except for the twitching of his wings. Guilt was twisting inside him. That’s not what he’d meant. Elliot couldn’t actually think that Luke hated him, could he? But to interrupt now and apologize might make things even worse. Maybe he should sneak away and talk to Elliot when he came back to the tent tonight.

Dale frowned. “Elliot, Luke is--”

“Luke Sunborn is brilliant and nearly always kind and more patient than anyone else,” Elliot said. “And I still made him hate me. So no. I can’t cheer him up.”

“I was going to say that Luke is standing behind you.”

Elliot turned. His mouth fell open a little, and then wider as he sucked in a gasp of shock and misery. Then he turned and ran into the forest.

It was usually hard to get Elliot to run his fastest. Luke had been training him for years, and every time he wanted Elliot to go all-out, it involved bribery and begging. Not this time. Elliot’s hair was glinting among the branches one moment, and the next he was gone.

“Um,” Dale said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Sorry. About all of that.”

Luke did not know what to say to Dale. He never knew what to say to Dale, but he especially did not know what to say now. He could not say it was okay.

“Are you going to go after Schafer?”

“What?”

“Are you going to go after him? Because if you’re not, I am.”

Luke was not always good at picking up on subtle hints, but he understood very clearly why Dale wanted to go after Elliot and what he would do when he found him.

Luke’s feathers ruffled. “Of course I’m going after him.”

Dale turned back to face the fire. “I am sorry,” he said.

Luke didn’t say anything to ease Dale’s conscience. He had an apology of his own to make, and he would hate if Elliot could not forgive him. But he couldn’t wave away what Dale had just said. He would always have those words with him now. No matter how good he got at being harpy and human, he’d never un-hear the disgust in Dale’s voice.

Luke thought it would be easy to catch up with Elliot, but he’d underestimated how hard it would be to find him in the dark, especially if Elliot didn’t want to be found. When he did finally spot red hair and dropped to the ground, it had been full dark for more than an hour. Elliot was sitting underneath a tree, staring ahead of him and running mulch though his hands.

“Elliot?” Luke lowered himself to sit at his side.

“Go away.”

Luke extended his wings and put one of them around Elliot. “You’re freezing.”

Elliot shrugged the wing off and scooted away. “I’m always cold. What’s new?”

“I’m sorry,” Luke said.

“It doesn’t matter.” Luke hated how Elliot’s voice sounded. It was worse than when he was angry with Luke. “You were right.”

He wasn’t, though. Yes, Elliot did mostly hang out with Serene, and him, and the dwarf girl whose name he couldn’t remember. And he did have a knack for making friends with whatever non-human creatures they met on their travels. An maybe it was true that there was no one who loved him back in the human world, but that made the human world stupid, not Elliot. Elliot probably didn’t even realize that Dale had wanted Luke to fly away home so he could be the one to find Luke in the forest and offer comfort.

“Come back to the tent. As you’ve told me probably a thousand times, you’re too delicate to spend the night out here.”

Elliot curled away from him. “Maybe you should stay with Serene. You know. Wandering hands.”

Luke clenched his jaw. He’d thought that Elliot had just been joking about that, willing to say whatever would get him his own tent. But there had been Elliot’s hand in his feathers this morning, and Elliot shouting at Dale that Luke was perfect.

“If you don’t want me in the tent tonight with you tonight, I understand. Either way, you can’t stay out here.”

“Wow. Does that mean I get one last flight back to camp?”

Why did Elliot think it would be the last? Maybe because Luke had probably violated the spirit of their truce, if not the letter of it. Elliot probably wanted nothing to do with him ever again. They would have to work out a custody schedule for spending time with Serene.

Luke picked Elliot up, and it was nothing like the last time, when Elliot had flung himself into Luke’s arms. Now he was tense and seperate.

They flew in silence for a few minutes before Elliot cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about Dale. I suppose I messed that up, too. I’m sure things will work out in the end. He might be a bit stupid, but he knows--”

“I don’t want to talk about Dale,” Luke answered. Why would he want to talk about Dale when there was Elliot.

Elliot frowned. “Okay. I understand that you don’t want to talk about him. We never have to say his name again, at least until he comes crawling back to you and apologizes profusely for being unworthy of you. But just so that you’re aware, I have invested many hours and plenty of brain power into schemes that bring the two of you together, and it would be a shame for all of that to go to waste.” He was silent for a moment.

When they reached the tent, there was some awkward shuffling around, but neither of them actually left to find another place to sleep. Elliot dropped off quickly, and Luke turned on his side to accommodate his tightly-folded wings and watch Elliot’s face.

Things that were Elliot Schafer’s fault:  
Luke always expected a fight from him.  
Luke could never seem to figure out when Elliot was being sarcastic and when he was serious.  
Luke couldn’t sleep.

Things that were Luke Sunborn’s fault:  
Elliot thought no one cared about him.

Luke woke to the muffled sounds of Elliot complaining about something. It was such a familiar, comforting sound that it took Luke several minutes to remember that he had taken a torch to everything flammable about Elliot yesterday and another several moments to realize why Elliot was complaining.

Elliot was being completely smothered in wings. He was enveloped in them entirely, not a stray hair or toe peeking out. Sometime during the night Luke’s wings had not just extended across Elliot, but caught him up and wrapped Elliot inside of them, like a cocoon. Like a hug.

Nope. Nope nope. Luke withdrew the wings and scrambled into a sitting position, watching Elliot to make sure he was still breathing and wasn’t about to start screaming.

“I’m sorry,” Luke muttered quickly. “They just--when I’m sleeping, they have a mind of their own.”

Elliot’s hair had reached a level of feather saturation that Luke had never dreamed possible, and he had a pinion crease line on his cheek. He seemed to be breathing, and for a moment there had been a spark of something in his eyes. Laughter, probably, at Luke. “You don’t need to apologize for your wings. They’re warm, and I am an enormous fan of them, as you obviously overheard last night.”

Well, there it was. Luke thought back to the strategy he’d used last time he’d wanted Elliot to understand him, but had been too afraid to say anything directly to Elliot. It would be forever before they were back in a classroom so he could raise his hand and announce that he had been at least partly in love with Elliot Schafer for several years, and that he would like to know with a lot more certainty whether Elliot saying that his wings were perfect like the rest of him and he was brilliant meant that he didn’t dislike Luke as much as it always seemed.

“I have a question.”

Elliot snorted, popping out of his Rock t-shirt and sending feathers in every direction. “That sounds like code for a conversation we probably best both avoid.”

Luke’s throat felt very dry. Maybe it was a conversation they should avoid. It was definitely not a conversation he was prepared to have while Elliot was shirtless. He waited while Elliot popped into another shirt, just as distracting as the first. “What if I hadn’t said I liked Dale? Back when you asked me who I liked.”

Elliot raised one eyebrow. “Are you serious, loser? Then I wouldn’t have spent years trying to get the two of you together, and what has felt like years carrying on actual conversations with Dale Wavechaser. I probably would have driven one less butter knife into my arm.”

Luke laughed at the irritated expression on Elliot’s face. It felt like familiar territory. “What if, instead of saying Dale, I said I liked Elliot Schafer?”

Elliot’s face fell. “I thought we were finished with you saying cruel things.”

“We are. I’m not. Elliot.”

“Oh. Well, you don’t have to pretend because you feel bad about what you said last night.” Elliot’s face twisted into an expression he probably intended as a smile. “Or what you overheard.”

“You were serious. About what you said last night, to Dale?” Luke needed to be sure.

Elliot’s painful smile grew. “Sure. But it’s not a big deal. I can still treat you with just as much indifference as ever.”

Why did this feel like having a conversation with a stone wall? Elliot wasn’t understanding Luke at all. But then, when had talking to Elliot felt any different?

“I told you I liked Dale because you wouldn’t stop asking, and I couldn’t possibly tell you that I had a crush on the kid I kept asking to come visit my family over the summer, could I?”

The smile on Elliot’s face wavered, and he took a little breath that caught in the middle. “That can’t be right. There’s no way someone like you would--with someone like me.”

Luke’s wings shivered with irritation. “There’s no someone like. I don’t want to be with someone like you. I want to be with you. I’ve been fascinated with you ever since we met, and I’ve pretended for years to be interested in someone like who I should be with, and you can see how that worked out. So.” He squared his shoulders, ready for a blow. “I want to date you. If you want to.”

He’d hurt Elliot last night expecting Elliot to land a death blow. Because he knew Elliot could. Elliot had proved over and over that he had all the tools needed to destroy Luke with his words, and Luke had wanted to be hurt. And instead of fighting back, instead of even defending himself, Elliot let the blow fall.

Because Elliot had understood. He’d known that Luke needed someone to take the knife from his hands yesterday and throw it away, so he couldn’t hurt anybody. He’d wanted Elliot to be the person who he could trust, the person who would take care of him when Luke didn’t know how to take care of himself. And that’s what Elliot had done.

Elliot looked at Luke from the corner of his eye, then started rolling his bedroll. For all his complaints about camping, he’d done it enough to look practiced with the little things like this. “I know that you’re not a mean person,” Elliot muttered as he worked, “Even if you are secretly a jerk. But I keep thinking that you’re dangling something in front of my face to see if I’ll jump for it. So you can laugh at how much I want it, even though it will never be mine.”

Luke hesitated. He could try more words, but Elliot didn’t seem to be hearing him. Instead, he crouched down across from Elliot and looked him in the eye. Was this right? He didn’t know how one went about kissing Elliot, or anyone else for that matter. He was a man of action, but this wasn’t a battle. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. “Can I--” Did he need to lean over more, or tilt--

Elliot leaned forward and took all the guesswork out of it.

Luke’s wings shot out in celebration before Luke could stop them, knocking against Elliot on one side and the fabric of the tent on the other.

“I’m sorry,” he rushed, “The wings--”

But Elliot was already fondly tucking Luke’s wing out of the way, laughing, and leaning back in.

Things that were Elliot Schafer’s fault:  
They were so late to report that Commander Woodsinger thought they had gotten lost in the forest and sent a search party.  
Luke had wings now. Wings that quivered whenever he looked in Elliot’s direction.

Things that were Luke Sunborn’s fault:  
Every single one of the feathers in Elliot Schafer’s hair.

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this definitely convinced me that this was not the right time for them to get together romantically, because it was like pulling teeth to resolve things. *shrug*
> 
> Also, I'm super excited because I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo and my story this year is totally inspired by In Other Lands. It's not fanfiction, but I'm going for a similar feel, and I can't wait to start writing!


End file.
